Private Wealth Management For Everyone

We combine investment management with comprehensive financial planning to give you the best in private wealth management.

In the late 20th century, I served the ultra-wealthy and business elite at a New York City hedge fund and at Stern Stewart & Co. – the EVA Company. Then, after the Dot.com stock market crash in 2000, I left Wall Street to serve individuals and their families.

Did you know that the average investor lost nearly half of her savings in the two market crashes in the first decade of the 21st century (2000 and 2008)?

The ultra-wealthy came out just fine. Why? The rich have better investment solutions than the rest of us….until now. We have changed that.

How ValueAligned® Can Help

Invest in Stocks of Great Companies

Over the past decades, we’ve worked with thousands of investors and learned that even some CPAs, CFOs, and other financial professionals don’t know the first thing about how to choose stocks.

Surprised?

Lacking number-crunching skills is usually not a problem in most people’s daily lives. But it could pose a major threat to their retirement.

Our founder has a Columbia MBA in finance and has managed multi-million-dollar hedge funds. You can trust that we know what we’re doing when it comes to choosing stocks of great companies.

Eliminate Hidden Fees

Most mutual funds contain hidden fees that can result in millions lost during decades of investing.

A few of them are legitimate, such as the investment advisory fees paid for your advisor to recommend the best funds for you to buy. Other fees are less defensible, such as sales loads (sales charges and commissions for buying and selling funds) and administrative fees. Not to mention fees to help your fund manager market her products so that her mutual fund company can make even more money!

Most people complain about $2 ATM transaction fees — think about how much they are paying in hidden mutual fund fees!

How is More Important than When

It’s nice to think that you can calculate when you can retire. But those calculations can do more harm than good if they cause you to retire too soon without a way to generate enough income to maintain your lifestyle. The “how” is much more important than the “when”.

Having sufficient income during retirement is what matters most. And in the vast majority of cases, the best prescription for sufficient income is to own stocks of great companies, purchased when they were “on sale”.

Once you’ve set that process in place, you can then start thinking about “when can I retire?”

Minimize Taxes

Separately managed accounts.

That phrase might not mean much to you, but it could mean a lot to your wallet.

The inability to separate accounts is the reason that people have to pay taxes on capital gains even when they lose money in their mutual fund.

With separately managed accounts, your stocks are owned by you directly, kept track of separately, and you pay taxes on only the realized gains on the individual stocks. This is a huge benefit because it allows us to pick, choose, and time when taxable income is incurred.

Our Value Investing Approach

The ValueAligned® Difference

Value Based Management

Economic Value Added Companies

No Middle Men

Separately Managed Accounts

Monitor Market Risk

Diversification

Reduce Costs/Raise Returns

Full Alignment of Manager and Shareholder Interests

Smart investors have noticed that fundamental problems arise where ownership and control of the modern corporation are separated. Managers control the firm and can make decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the firm’s owners.

Value-based management systems (VBM) are the answer to this problem.

Our value-based investing method avoids stocks in companies whose managers’ interests are not aligned with the interests of investors’. We know that these companies will not lead to long-term value for our clients.

What is an Economic Value Added™ Stock?

An Economic Value Added™ Stock
is a stock of a company that has high Economic Value Added™ (EVA), meaning that it is likely to provide maximum shareholder value based on certain calculations.

Consulting firm Stern Stewart & Co. developed and trademarked the EVA™ methodology to mitigate the various flaws in other valuation measures.

From 1997 to 2002, ValueAligned® Partners’ founder, David Berkowitz, was in charge of Stern Stewart’s North American EVA™ implementations. He specialized in advising manufacturing companies on how to manage the company to maximize shareholder value, so he can spot a well-run company – from a shareholder’s point of view – from a mile away.

Now, he uses his unique Economic Value Added™ expertise to help average investors grow their retirement savings.

The ValueAligned® Difference

You may have worked with an independent financial advisor whom you thought was serving as a fiduciary but instead turned out to be nothing but a middle man.

Eliminating 100% of all middle men (and the high fees they command) has been one of our core values since David Lee Berkowitz founded the firm in 2002. We wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s one of many ways that we ensure you’re getting the maximum possible retirement savings.

Don’t Ever Pay More in Taxes than You Have To

Separately managed accounts (SMAs) have traditionally been a tool for the wealthy. Unfortunately, they’ve traditionally been out of the reach of most other investors. But with the incredible advances in technology, we can now avail them to all of our clients.

Our “breatkthrough solution” SMA
requires just a $25,000 investment and an all-in cost to clients of 1% – no commissions, no open end mutual fund fees or other costs and no marketing fees – just 1% for everything.

Separately managed accounts avoid tax pitfalls by giving the investors the benefits of professional money management, with all of the tax efficiencies associated with individual cost basis.

Quite simply, SMAs can do all these great things because of technology…specifically, computing power. Instead of having to pool investors’ money with that of other investors to gain enough money to buy one full share of stock (as is the case with mutual funds), computing power now allows us to buy a fractional share of stock for you – and you alone.

The Role of Risk in Stock Investing

Pretty much every human is vulnerable to the “buy high, sell low” scenario. It’s all based on the instinct to preserve what we have while holding on to as much money as possible.

If anyone tells you they can consistently and successfully “time the market,” we give you license to call them out. No one, not even experienced stock investors like us, can consistently call the market’s short-term ups and downs.

Successful investors are in the market for the long-term – staying the course with a consistent investment program – avoiding critical market-timing mistakes.

Staying the course does not mean “buy and hold forever” or “buy and forget” stock investing. It’s about making regular investments and adjusting your portfolio as your needs and market-prices-relative-to-value change, as opposed to trying to time the market’s short-term ups and downs.

It means periodically reviewing your portfolio
and rebalancing it to avoid becoming predominated by over-valued stocks. And it means measuring and monitoring market-based risk so we can change tactics when the risk of general market decline increases.

Exploring Mutual Fund Alternatives

Diversification is the process of combining different types of non-correlated investments that don’t all move in the same direction, by the same amount, at the same time in reaction to market forces. An example diversified portfolio might include retail, technology, and energy stocks, all with different risk characteristics.

By optimizing different investment type combinations that don’t move together, it is possible to generate higher returns without increasing risk — when one security or securities from one sector perform poorly, others may perform well. Therefore, diversification allows you to incur less risk and achieve higher expected returns in the market over an extended period.

Reduced Costs. Increased Customization. Full Tax Management.

Investment costs such as fees, commissions, and sales charges matter! The more you pay, the less you earn in return.

ValueAligned® Partners brings our clients UNLIMITED COMMISSION-FREE TRADING on MOST SECURITIES in exchange for a low annual fee based on invested assets. That’s it. No commissions, loads, or other fees to separate you from your money.

Study after study consistently shows that, over the long term, mutual funds actually trail the broad market averages, such as the S&P 500 index.

Add in the tax-minimization abilities built into the ValueAligned® Investing approach, and it’s hard to believe why anyone would choose the mutual fund approach. The truth is, it’s usually based in fear of bucking the trend – “Everyone else invests in mutual funds, so I guess I should too.” Following the herd is almost always a bad idea, however.

The TOTAL cost to any ValueAligned® Partners client is one low fee. (*Note that your custodian may charge for other services like IRA trust maintenance.)

ValueAligned® Partners is an investment management company founded by investment advisor David L Berkowitz. We offer investment management and financial planning services across the nation. Nothing contained on this site constitutes investing advice or a recommendation for the purchase and/or sale of financial securities by ValueAligned Partners, LLC or any partner or affiliate of ValueAligned Partners, LLC - an NJ state registered investment advisor. Any purchases or sales of financial securities are solely at the discretion of the reader.